In a new exhibition, the British Museum traces the shared roots of three ancient Indian religions

“This kind of imagery is now part of day-to-day life,” says the curator Sushma Jansari of the types of objects included in the British Museum’s new exhibition Ancient India: Living Traditions, which presents devotional art of three of India’s great religions: Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. “These are faiths practised by almost two billion people around the world. Our show is about the commonalities, our shared cultural heritage,” she says.

Now distinct in beliefs and culture, all three religions are interlinked, drawing on the same early traditions and texts, though they have developed in different and occasionally conflicting directions since. Hindus are the largest of the groups, making up around 80% of India’s population with close to one billion adherents; there are around 500 million Buddhists globally (mostly in China) and around six million Jains (mostly in India).

Jansari says that, for her, this commonality is expressed most articulately through devotional art that goes back to the ancient roots of the religions, which still finds its way into current ritual and practice—hence the show’s title. “It all originates with the nature spirits of the subcontinent,” she says. “I thought it could be really surprising for people to find deep-rooted commonalities between these different religions, and to highlight how pervasive these nature spirits were.”

As an example, Jansari points to images of Laksmī—the goddess of good fortune and fertility venerated by all three groups—that derive ultimately from the Yakshas, the mythical nature spirits whose worship goes back to at least the third century BC. Belief in these spirits, which on the face of it is evidence of a more direct relationship between early peoples and their environments, resulted in some of India’s earliest devotional art. Among these is the exhibition’s earliest piece, a carving of Gaja-Laksmī (or Elephant-Laksmī) from the lintel of a cave in Maharashtra state dating to the second century BC. The persistence of such iconography is evident in a near-identical image of Gaja-Laksmī appearing in a painting from around 1780, from Rajasthan, about 450 miles to the north. “It’s all about fertility, plenty, and that imagery was so successful that you see just how pervasive the nature spirits were,” Jansari says. “It brings together these different religions, the different regions and—really importantly—links together the ancient and the contemporary.”

The spectre of colonialism

But as with any exhibition of this kind, knotty issues of colonialism, provenance and restitution rear their head, especially given the nature of the UK’s historical relationship with India, and the British Museum’s place within that. Jansari says that it is a “complex” issue, perhaps not as cut and dried as it might appear. “It’s really important to be open and honest about it—every single object in the show has a provenance label. I know that maybe newspapers have to show a black-and-white take on it, but the reality is actually that it’s quite complicated,” she says.

Jansari points to what she describes as “collecting history moments” in the exhibition: detailed descriptions of how key objects were removed from their original sites. For example, the remains of the Amarāvati Stupa, an early Buddhist shrine dating back to the third century BC, were largely destroyed in the 18th century by the local governor Vasireddy Venkatadri Nayudu, and the subsequent arrival of the East India Company’s Major Colin Mackenzie resulted in the first, relatively amateurish, attempts to excavate and disperse its artefacts to institutions around India and in Britain.

The curatorial team have moreover uncovered intriguing new information about the nature of museum donors: Jansari says that Kajal Meghani, the project curator, identified more than 150 South Asian collectors who have contributed to the British Museum’s holdings. This, she says, “challenges the long-held perception of the ‘British’ Museum and invites a more inclusive and nuanced understanding of its origins and influences.”

Jansari says that, in the end, the exhibition’s value lies in its fostering of community. “Devotional art is the focus of the exhibition, but you can’t understand devotional art without understanding a bit about the religions. Our key audience is a multi-generational family audience that’s not necessarily just South Asian or even British or international visitors,” she says. “It’s for the whole family—really vibrant and really colourful.”

• Ancient India: Living Traditions, British Museum, London, 22 May-19 October